The present invention relates to devices and methods for a durable insect bait station. In particular, the present invention relates to bait stations that are suitable for insects having a proboscis including moths, blood-sucking insects such as mosquitoes, and other biting flies.
Currently, bait stations are one of the most interesting and promising insect control techniques. A bait station is a device that is installed in a way that the targeted insects can feed on the bait, either outdoors or indoors.
Typical prior-art bait is a viscous substance or aqueous-gel mixture having an attractant, a substance that the insect uses as food (e.g., sugar or a carbohydrate solution), and a toxin (e.g., boric acid, spinosad, and dinotefurn). The bait formulation may further include preservatives and colorants. Such lures attract insects to feed on the bait, while the toxin enters the insect body during feeding (either by ingestion or contact), causing its death.
A major drawback of prior-art bait technologies is the sensitivity to outdoor environments, such as sunlight, dust, rain, dew, and cold flow due to gravity. Attempts to coat the bait with a membrane, such as the approaches taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,601,337 by McKenney, Sr. and U.S. Pat. No. 6,718,689 by Kolibas, do not provide workable solutions due to membrane sensitivity to harsh and/or persistent heat and sunlight, and due to the relatively high hardness parameter of the membrane.
Sensitivity to heat and sunlight can cause cracking and loss of elasticity of the membrane. Cold flow of sugar bait causes loss of material and uneven distribution along the dimensions of the bait. Baits having no outer membrane tend to accumulate dust that sticks to the bait, while the sunlight's radiation (particularly in the UV range) can cause severe degradation within a short period of time of outdoor exposure. Such degradation causes severe loss of elasticity, hardening, and brittleness. The hardness of a membrane that is typical of the prior art can prevent many insect probes (i.e., proboscis) from being able to pierce the membrane, and penetrate into the bait. Moreover, the prior-art materials used as the “building blocks” for the membranes are actually impermeable to odorant molecules that need to migrate outside the membrane barrier in order to attract the insects. Furthermore, at least some of the prior-art membrane materials are susceptible to microbial attack.
It would be desirable to have such devices and methods for a durable insect bait station. Such devices and methods would, inter alia, would overcome the limitations described above by improving the resistance of membrane-coated baits to sunlight, dust, rain, dew, cold flow due to gravity, microbial attack, and hydrolysis, while allowing insects to detect (i.e., smell) odorants migrating outside of the bait, and allowing insects' probes to easily pierce the bait membrane and penetrate into the bait, particularly insects with delicate probes such as mosquitoes.